nto great plants and trees, of quite
different shape from themselves, and these trees again produce fresh
seeds, to grow into fresh trees, they would have said, "The thing cannot
be; it is contrary to nature." And they would have been quite as right
in saying so, as in saying that most other things cannot be.

Or suppose again, that you had come, like M. Du Chaillu, a traveller
from unknown parts; and that no human being had ever seen or heard of an
elephant. And suppose that you described him to people, and said, "This
is the shape, and plan, and anatomy of the beast, and of his feet, and
of his trunk, and of his grinders, and of his tusks, though they are
not tusks at all, but two fore teeth run mad; and this is the section of
his skull, more like a mushroom than a reasonable skull of a reasonable
or unreasonable beast; and so forth, and so forth; and though the beast
(which I assure you I have seen and shot) is first cousin to the little
hairy coney of Scripture, second cousin to a pig, and (I suspect)
thirteenth or fourteenth cousin to a rabbit, yet he is the wisest of all
beasts, and can do everything save read, write, and cast accounts."
People would surely have said, "Nonsense; your elephant is contrary to
nature"; and have thought you were telling stories--as the French
thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that he had
shot a giraffe; and as the king of the Cannibal Islands thought of the
English sailor, when he said that in his country water turned to marble,
and rain fell as feathers. They would tell you, the more they knew of
science, "Your elephant is an impossible monster, contrary to the laws
of comparative anatomy, as far as yet known." To which you would answer
the less, the more you thought.

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years,
that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know
that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world?
People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are
ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying
dragons could exist.

The truth is, that folks' fancy that such and such things cannot be,
simply because they have not seen them, is worth no more than a savage's
fancy that there cannot be such a thing as a locomotive, because he
never saw one running wild in the forest. Wise men know that their
business is to examine what is, and not to settle what